The Obsessive Diary

Electric House, early afternoon, the low arched room that stretches with opulence was scantily clad; perfect young women with perfect young hair scraped back for the serious stuff of tapping importance into laptops. Not many, just enough to fill the hush. A central table and sofas adorned with mothers and babies, a pram blocked the way between tables. A little girl knocked over crayons and demanded she take the menu home. Her mother patiently explained the restaurant would be cross. Her mother had perfect hair too. Blonde and rich. Thick to the shoulders. As they left I realised the other woman wasn’t a mother to these toddlers and infants at all but the nanny, wheeling them out while the mother wondered how to pay, holding up the bill and walking away. I have judgements. I probably have no right to these.

They left room for a clear view of two men in the uniform of ageing tech bro rock star pretender probably worked in the music business or cars. Or art. Or something that took them to Ibiza. Shaved heads that fuzzed. Five o’clock shadows that did the same. Suits. Heavy weight glasses lifted to the brow. Voices that belonged east of here, that had watched too much Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, that wore flat caps on the weekend when shooting movies or ducks. One was larger than the other. One was leaning forward in his seat. I heard something about apologise; “you should apologise when… “ and the smaller one shuffle and beg and do that crawling that dogs do when they bare their teeth. He wanted something. It stopped him from beating his chest.

Their conversation staggered on, Big Man ever more comfortable in his leaning back, forty-five degree angle to the table that had pots of tea, glasses of water. He managed to put his ankle up on his knee, his knee jutting, white socks, loafers, message sent, I’m done. Little Man stood up. It was almost over. If only he hadn’t sat down again. He stood up and chattered in the relief flooding I am almost out of here way that made him affable again, easy. He made the other guy laugh, ears prick at some titbit of information and before he knew it his hand was on the back of the chair, pulling it out and he was down again, legs spread, elbows resting, the enthusiasm of launching into a story that this other guy might actually enjoy made him forget the past hour of humiliating discomfort, the power play, the please for the love of god be my friend. Big Guy began scratching his nose. Then his earlobe. Then the back of his head rubbed with big hands that said what the f**k is this guy thinking. Can’t he take a message? and if there had been a hint of reconciliation and yeah maybe I’ll let you back in the gang, it was gone. Little guy had overplayed his moment. The anecdote begun so happily fell among white china tea pots and glasses half filled. The second leaving was awkward. Little man tucked in his chair like he was at school, or leaving the dinner table, dismissed.

His departure down the long opulent archway of Electric House, paintings filling the walls, sofas of perfect young teatime business and a bar that will serve cocktails tonight was hurried and quiet and don’t look back. Put your glasses on. Remember tomorrow is another day. Big Man didn’t watch him go like I did. Big Man heaved a sigh of relief and buried himself in his phone.

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Sonder: the word I want written on my arm in tiny script so that it reminds me.

Sonder is the awareness that every stranger you encounter has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

A man on the street, naked; I saw him from my Uber as I drove uptown. At first I thought he was wearing a suit, the uniform colour of his skin gave an impression of organised outfit, it made him stand out amongst the crowds walking by, some hurrying, some on their phones, none stopping, all navigating around him as if he wasn’t there. I imagined him realising - I’m invisible! and throwing a leaping pirouette. But he wasn’t dancing. He was staring down at objects loosely scattered at his feet, he was pointing and counting and reversing as if they encroached like a tide across the sidewalk, pushing him backwards to the road.

A man as I walked up 5th, a street corner for a board meeting, heads of department invisible to me but not to him. A finance discussion, a fine-tuned explanation of investment and stock prices and where to put the money. Perhaps all faces were turned to him as he paced eloquently, one arm illustrating the need to follow closely his thinking. Perhaps the company he kept were all listening intently.

An argument in Midtown. Another street corner, another man but his morning was a face saddened with unacceptable effort that his rational point of view was leading nowhere. He persuaded with both arms. His opponent appeared in my mind to be larger than him, a giant or maybe it was God or maybe it was his parent. He was so eloquent in his efforts. I wondered how long he’d been trying to make them see.

And in Boston before I left while stationary at lights on the way to South Station, a figure dressed in black; black exercise pants tight to the ankle under loose trousers rolled up at the knee, black raincoat, the hood up, black trainers and he stood with is back to us facing down the wide dead end of an alleyway, pigeons at his feet.

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Holy s**t. I’ve seen a fair bit of theatre in my time, mostly forgotten, but the greats will never be. The inaugural meeting of the We Three Bookclub happened this week (and yes, my friends, I’ve adopted that name without consulting either of you, who do I think I am etc 😂, but I like it.) - K had just come from seeing something in Wales which was wholly forgettable and we ranged among a million subjects other than Little Dorrit including how live performances can let themselves down; opera, musicals, theatre, we picked out the ones that will stay with us forever, mine Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and that would have remained my tippity-top if I hadn’t, on Friday night with L, seen John Proctor is the Villain. As I said, Holy S**t, and you can quote me on that.

The script - Kimberley Belflower take a bow, Take two bows. Take so many bows that you no longer know which way is up. To write with such fluency. To twist and turn a classroom, young voices, The Crucible from spring to torrent until nothing existed for us 389, full to capacity seated on our edge but the lit stage, the world of 2018 in Georgia and a young woman, believed. That final speech when it’s just Shelby and Raelynn had me losing time and space, had me finally understanding what it means to hang on every word; there was a moment when the actor, Miya James, had left the shores of the beginning of it but was no where near in sight of its end and she was free floating, flying on its sheer brilliant wings and I felt the ground drop away beneath me.

The idea - The Crucible unwrapped and unpacked, turned on its head, revealed for what it is, yet another applauding of a man for safeguarding his name. There’s a speech Shelby delivers to Carter about the fiction of his name as opposed to the fact of her body that nails the inequity and absurdity of this so perfectly I pray it finds its way onto every school curriculum.

The structure - when a writer pulls off that trick of stacking a narrative around a known play so that the story reveals itself in a looping hall of mirrors I can only sit back and wonder at the four-dimensional mind-bend of it. A classroom of students studying The Crucible, so far so simple, yet by the end these boundaries have been rewritten.

The final scene and its impact had me standing, and yes, I’ll admit it, crying my f*****g eyes out which never happens to me in a theatre except this time it did. Those girls, and Kimberley Belflower, spoke for all of us. I realise it’s sold out but if they ever run another production, get your hands on a ticket, pronto.

Before I sign off, it’s the launch of Fallout next week and I’m going to be live streaming the party so if you want to be virtually there, here’s the link.

Eleanor

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Easter was B at the farm for a fortnight and me coming and going for the first week but for the second, a whole week together, was a gentle delight. Just me and them doesn’t happen often what with friends and them being at uni and so I’m impelled to write, to mention it, our time together cohesive and easy, a dance of meals and backgammon, walks and conversations about how we would make this world function with equity. That is where B and I meet, academically but also with our hearts. A basic living wage for all, artists recognised for their vital part in the health of a nation by being state supported to create, and how to tie income to cost of living so that no one grows rich on another’s struggle. We dream of an ecology where the CEO’s pay packet is in percentage cohort with the cleaner’s, and disagree on the place of capitalism. We dissect private land ownership and unpack communism. We ask if competitiveness exists where resources are unlimited. I wonder what field B will make their working home once uni is over and perhaps they’ve done a masters and maybe a PHD. I feel optimistic that their social conscience is shared amongst their friends.

And we walked and we talked and we went to the stones. When the AGA blew up we got in the car, practically in our pyjamas like the Tiger Who Came To Tea, and went to Cranleigh for supper. There, a woman flouted all preconceived notions of Surrey women, and coming up to our table said how hard she tries to get these modern linguistics, they, them around her middle-aged tongue and she has gay sons and all that matters is love. She continued to get it wrong even as she stood there being human and funny and trying and isn’t that what Angie Browne and I talked about? Risk getting it wrong, and when she returned to her own table of two couples and white wine we loved her for her open-heart and joy in saying hello.

This week I’m in London with J who today flies off to Sri Lanka. After my LIVE with the wonderful letter-writing Fiona Melrose we skipped out the door and onto the tube, still thrilled by the ease of the city. To Tottenham Court Road and there we were in Soho, on our way to Barafina via Trisha’s, a speakeasy basement dive of the these don’t exist anymore kind, yet they do if you look hard enough. Down stained and trodden green carpet stairs, the stench of ancient cigarettes pulling us into a room of two person tables and plastic red cloths, a wood chip bar and two men, hair combed over, stools to fall off. The walls a festivity of nights photographed at their height of whisky and high balls, forgotten friends loved madly, the floor sticky, the lighting scant. £25 a year for membership, eat your heart out Soho House. This is what all other clubs try for and fail at, their desire for clean mess a falsehood where Trisha’s never tries, it just is.

Dinner at Barafina (exquisite) and a walk down darkened Portobello, mistaking the lights in the sky for the moon. Did you see the Artemis photos? Wouldn’t it be great if this perspective on our blue dot brought sense.

The lights turned out to be lasers from Wembley or some such, but for a moment there we considered the moon in her glory or even aliens.

Eleanor

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Dear Lodge Farm,

You and I have been through a lot together. When I came here you were three hundred years old and I was twenty-five. Or maybe, in the way of multiple incarnations, we were both ancient in brick and flesh skins. You were tumble down and damp, cramped with linoleum and carpet, avocado green bathrooms and alarms, wisteria tore at your hair. An alleyway of cobbles and moss ran along your back, stones shouldered the hill from crushing you and all your rooms seemed underwater, under earth, dark and musty with the weight of trees and roots. There were broken down buildings gathered around you like old tired friends locked in ivy, beams that half fell to darkness where we imagined crying; when I first came here a milkmaid used to walk the grass by the wall to the L-shaped barn and a mother and baby haunted an upstairs bedroom. Slipped tiles and broken guttering, water rising beneath quick fix slabs of concrete, a fitted kitchen that fitted no one. Do you remember?

We arrived and flung wide windows. We scrubbed the underlay from wooden floors. We ripped those avocado green bathrooms out and built plinths and painted the ceilings sky blue with clouds scudding. We went in with gloved hands, bandannas on our faces, and pulled at the ivy and hauled at the beams falling. We imagined we released trapped souls. We lit candles and chanted and brought in the light. I remember on nights here, you creaking with multiple lives, saying, let’s live together peacefully, okay? and we did. The milkmaid disappeared. The crying baby stopped. The mother, dead in childbirth, vanished.

That was our beginning, the commune, the first marriage, the pagans in the wood. Then came Australia, a return with a bird of paradise, a second marriage, children and divorce and a move to the L-shaped barn so that you could be ripped out again, the entire first way of being forgotten in builders and new floors and literally hauling the hill away from your back so that you could role your shoulders, hold your head up and breathe. No more damp. A garden terraced with steps in odd places to allow me to walk in circles when I worked. A studio entirely redesigned and shifted on its axis. A bedroom erased of two men. We, my children and I, reentered your papered hallway, your bright and easy kitchen where doors had become windows, and windows had become doors and we set up a new childhood there.

Train tracks ran from school room to scullery. A library considered itself one of the finest. Intelligent storage packed away whole cities of lego and brought it out again to pierce at bare feet and give us memories of life lived on the floor building star ships. An attic that used to cramp itself into knots to fit the water tank became a thrill to say to guests, you’re up here as a creak up ancient steps revealed two more bedrooms and a bathroom, a view that made them sigh. You grew, you settled, occasionally a tile slipped or a pipe burst but we were here, I was here, to catch you. Your aging seemed to reverse. You blossomed into a youth you hadn’t seen before and appeared to double in size. We were happy. The children grew.

There were ponies in the garden and apples on the trees. Chickens tried and failed to avoid foxes. Potatoes pushed up through soil and blackberries became crumble in our hands. By your AGA lay children and animals, birthdays brought cakes from the oven and Christmas brought the box of decorations out from your musty hallway cupboard. I fell in love here again.

But as David Shrigley says, all things must end and you and I know the wheel has turned. In these thirty years from when you were three hundred and I was twenty-five you’ve reincarnated three times to fit my changing life. You’ve recovered healthy lungs and a strong and beating heart. You’ve solidified your walls and mended broken guttering, your wisteria no longer tears at your hair but drapes instead in tendrils violet and gleaming. You are well, in high spirits, you and I have blossomed together. The barns have become cottages, the land we care for has expanded and we have a stone circle to keep us anchored to what matters most. You and I are healthy, the children are grown, and so it is time to move on. My dearest Lodge Farm, I’m not deserting you, there’s no abandoning going on, we need your rock-solid here-ness to come home to, the children and I, and I’m making sure you’re cared for, but there’s something that I want now, too. A London life high-kicking free of responsibility that allows me to walk out the door with just keys and a phone and change my mind on a dime and go where I please without planning. Without driving. Without train tickets and schedules and who’ll look after the cats. My dearest Lodge Farm, I have done my time and I’ve done it well. You’re old enough now and in the best of health to stand on your own two feet. You know how to hold the space for me without the AGA exploding or the pipes bursting. We love you. Be here for us when we come home.

Eleanor

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It’s my birthday. Fifty-five today and I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be which has got to be the best birthday present of all. Birthday presence. I’ll take that. Normally I cry on my birthday but I get the feeling this time I won’t.

I moved into the new flat a week or so ago and then was high-tailing it to France after only a night here. M and I flew back on Wednesday and went west first to hers and then Chaggers to see S and doggles and her incredible show. What it is to have such talented friends and celebrate them.

I love staying at hers, or rather, her neighbour’s which is linked to hers by secret doors behind bookshelves and curtains. I always think when I go there that if an American could see it (yes Adam Nathan, I’m looking at you) they’d think they’d fallen into a fairy fantasy hobbit film of entirely unreal proportions. Up on the moors, the final lurch a sunken road dripping moss on ancient stone, a hamlet firmly ignoring time, its shoulders to the wind and each other’s walls, shells along the path to steps happy to break your ankle. The twists and turns of rooms and stairs that could easily lead you in circles even with the lights on, low ceilings and rugs and inching past sofas and stepping over settles and a kitchen that would give even the mildest of agents a heart attack. There is no compliance here. There is the best of sleeps.

We hung out at the show and then went for tea at F’s who’s inherited another parrot called pigeon who will only speak to her. The other looks on with mild disgust. Dinner at the pub and we all, on sudden food, felt the exhaustion of our pillar to post (me and M) and hanging a show (S).

M dropped me at the station the next morning, the train to Paddington, a quick change and forty winks at home and T arrived with dancing shoes on. We got food and chatted the catch up we’ve been missing and then there we were, heading into Annie Macmanus ‘s Before Midnight at 7:45pm and so ready my body started moving before I’d folded my coat into a locker. I’d been looking forward to this for months.

There are no photos - of course there are no photos because that was the point. “We’re here to dance,” said Annie. Two thousand people brought together for the love of the beat; it’s been years since I’ve been in a club and I’d forgotten the joy of the faces. Two thousand up turned smiling humans all agreeing that dancing is the best, that coming together to move in unison is a world-beating way of feeling the love, that love is without bounds or limits. Up on the balcony behind the decks, Annie doing what she does best, spinning the room into unity, arms raised, hearts open, bodies moving as one. It’s a prayer and a church and we are all devotees and when Human League remixed into a chorus that everyone knew I felt that despite all the madness outside, it was going to be all right. Look what we’re capable of. Look what we love doing. Annie - we love you. I will be doing that again and again.

I danced non-stop for four hours, a thirty something pulled me into a hug and shouted I can’t believe your stamina! and I thought, yes, the years of dirty desert outback parties, dancing for a week and my body knows this place. Give me a beat and my body can keep going forever.

On the way home one of those tableaus that make the late night tube a theatre - a man slumped in comatose sleep, another man and his wife boarded the train, he in suit and coat and hat, she in rain Mac and small walking tour rucksack. He took the space half taken already by the sleeping man, and the man snuggled into his shoulder, quite happy. The wife refused to sit.

Minutes later, the man and his wife left and the sleeping man lay down, his head on the lap of his new bed fellow and throughout it all there was laughter and gentleness and care.

The weekend’s been spent here in London and I woke on Saturday morning with the distinct impression that I was playing truant from my life. What is this easy space with carpets and walk to the shops? With no heavy load of thirty years driving and caring and running the beauty that is the farm no doubt, but is no doubt a load to carry? Here I can go out, forget something, come back and it doesn’t involve a three point turn in a sloping lane. Here I am light. I carry nothing but the dustpan and brush picked up from the local hardware store as I slowly gather the essentials. Have I really escaped my life? Or is this a new one? The latter, obviously, a new iteration, a chapter of me that begins At fifty-five I moved to London and I am filled with gratitude. How lucky I am to have this happen, to be able to make this happen.

Yesterday J and I sat on the floor prepping his portfolio, the carpet covered in double-sided tape strips. In the print shop a couple with their three-week old baby came in for passport photos. It made me think of my conversation with Marc Typo , how exactly the thing happened that we discussed, the immediate language of mothers, intimate and to the point, how she can’t think what she used to do with all her time and here I was with J, nearly nineteen years later, that exquisite, precious time in the past and how much I cherish it. She held up the print for me to see, she looks like a little mafia boss all dark hair and scrunched face and sleep and we laughed and off she went into her nineteen years.

Meanwhile the farm of course, in true farm style decided to mark the occasion of my leaving by exploding the AGA; a frantic call with K got it turned off while she valiantly cleaned up the soot which by all accounts has plastered every surface and turned Percy Cat a shade of grey. No matter. All change tends to come with a shifting of bodies and the farm has rustled her full muddy skirts and lifted her giant arms in the air and the beats have knocked a few things over. I will be home there tomorrow. All will be well. Happy Birthday to me.

Eleanor

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